The Umbra is the spirit world, a realm of concepts and emotion and metaphor beyond crude physical reality. The spirit world and mundane Earth are two halves of a long-lost whole, separated now by the invisible threshold called the Gauntlet. The Garou believe that Gaia designed them as half-spirit creatures so that they would be able to sense and navigate spiritual realities in ways that ordinary creatures of flesh and blood cannot.

Stepping Sideways

On Earth and in the Penumbra (the part of the spirit world "closest" to Earth), any werewolf can reach out with a sixth sense to detect the presence of the Gauntlet, like a spidersilk curtain between the two worlds. In places like cities, the Gauntlet feels oppressive and thick; in places like the wilderness, it feels solid but more pliable; in holy places like Caerns, it is gossamer-thin. With supernatural effort, a Garou can part that curtain and cross to the other side. This act is called Stepping Sideways.

To step sideways, make a Gnosis Challenge against a number of Traits that describes the local Gauntlet: two or three Traits in the heart of a Caern, six in the wilderness, seven or eight in the city, nine or ten in a strictly-ordered stronghold of humanity like a hospital or DMV. A Storyteller determines the precise local difficulty.

You may spend the Primal Urge Ability to retest this Challenge. If you successfully cross, your passage is gradual: you fade out of the world you're in, and you spend up to a minute pulling yourself through spiderwebs to reach the other side and appear there. During this time you are in stasis; you cannot act, you cannot even regenerate; the only thing you can do is think (which, mercifully, permits pack link to work). You may spend two Mental Traits to hurry this along instead, making the passage through the Gauntlet nearly instantaneous.

You may also spend a point of Gnosis to cross relatively instantaneously. You may decide to do this before you try the challenge or after you fail. Crossing this way (or by winning the Challenge and spending the Mental Traits) causes you to tear through to the other side within seconds: if you're in combat, you disappear from one world and appear in the other at the end of the current combat round. Crossing quickly by either means (spending the gnosis or winning the crossing challenge and spending two mental traits) takes up the entire round, and you cannot perform any other actions besides passive resistance.

You may not attempt to step sideways if you have no remaining Gnosis. You may not step sideways if you would end your step in solid material.

You do not have to “step” in order to get to the umbra. It simply using the part of yourself that is spirit to slip through the weave that separates the real world form the umbra. So "stepping" as in movement is not required. You can actively slip sideways regardless of how restrained you are. Chairs, ropes, ect do not matter. It’s a question of veil and other complications. An Alpha of a pack can drag a packmate with them through the umbra. Pocket/bags or things in your hands can taken with you.

Getting Stuck in the Gauntlet

If you fail a challenge to step sideways, you risk getting stuck in the Gauntlet during your attempt. Make two Rock-Paper-Scissors tests with a Storyteller. If you lose (not tie) them both, you have become entangled in the webs between worlds. Only packmates or skilled Theurges will be able to locate and rescue you, by making a successful sidestepping challenge of their own. Many Garou without such help have been lost forever -- so a wise Garou does not make the attempt lightly.

Using Mirrors

The physical presence of reflective surfaces such as mirrors and still ponds affects the Gauntlet spiritually, making it thinner. If you look into a reflective surface while attempting to step sideways, the difficulty of the challenge is reduced by one. You also do not risk getting stuck: your failure ruins the reflective surface instead. Mirrors shatter, metal tarnishes, and ripples break still waters.

Leading a Pack

A member of a pack may make a single sidestepping challenge to lead their entire pack through the Gauntlet at once. If they fail the initial test, they are well-advised to spend the point of Gnosis to force the pack through -- getting your entire pack stuck in the Gauntlet is disastrous.

Peeking Through the Gauntlet

Sometimes Garou don't want to cross -- they just want to see what's on the other side. A standard sidestepping challenge accomplishes this task as well, but only if you are peeking from the Umbra back to Earth -- you can't look from Earth into the Umbra (unless you have the Uktena tribe advantage). You do not risk getting stuck in the Gauntlet if you fail -- you just can't see across.

The Gauntlet on a Caern

The Gauntlet on the bawn of a Caern is as weak as the Caern is strong. A level 5 Caern has a Gauntlet of 1; a level 4 Caern has a Gauntlet of 2; etc. At the heart of the Caern, there is no Gauntlet. The spirit and the physical worlds are one.

Navigating the Penumbra

The Penumbra is the part of the spirit world closest to Earth -- the place where the Gauntlet divides the two worlds. Stepping sideways takes you to and from the Penumbra. This world bears a spiritual resemblance to an area's physical appearance, but it isn't exact: landmarks appear only when they have special history or significance in the physical world. A new high-rise might be completely absent, while an old manor where terrible murders occurred can linger on spiritually decades after the city tears it down on Earth. Spiritual landmarks with no analogue in the physical world are also common, such as hidden glades where wind-spirits play, or a burning field of garbage where demons of pollution feed.

Obvious differences aside, a spiritual correspondence exists between the Penumbral landscape and what's on Earth. That burning field of garbage in the Umbra may be a pleasant park on Earth -- where a factory secretly dumps its waste chemicals. Making changes to one side strengthens or weakens what's on the other side. Chopping down a venerable tree-spirit in the Penumbra may sicken the forest around it on Earth, and vice-versa.

Beings and items of spiritual power on Earth, like werewolves and active Fetishes, cast vague reflections into the spirit world -- not enough to identify them by, but enough to know there's something unusual going on there back on Earth.

Travel through the local spirit world isn't as straightforward as travel on Earth. The sun does not appear: high noon on Earth is like twilight there. At night, Luna's face appears enormous in the sky, filling the Umbra with silvery light if she's in one of her fuller phases. For these reasons Garou navigate by scent more often than by sight. Distances in the spirit world shift and change unpredictably; even time can flow at strange rates, although this is less pronounced if you remain close to Earth.

Shapechanging in the Umbra

Shifting forms while in the Penumbra is instantaneous, costing neither Rage nor Primal-Urge. This is sometimes true in other Umbral Realms as well, but each Realm has its own laws (which sometimes change from visit to visit).

Moon Paths

A common method of travel for Garou are Moon Paths, paths through the sky wrought of moonlight and Luna's good graces. Spirits of the moon called Lunes guard these paths, which often link Caerns or connect the Penumbra to other spiritual realms. The nature of the paths wax and wane depending on the phase of the moon. During the new moon, the pathways are tenuous and dangerous, plagued by Banes, but during the full moon they are broad, safe and strong (although the Lunes guarding them may require tests of strength to let Garou pass).

Moon Bridges are much like moon paths. However, Bridges are specifically crafted to span between two Caerns.

Umbral Geography

The Penumbra offers wonders enough for a lifetime, but the entire spirit world is more vast and strange still. Generations of Garou Theurges have studied it, generations of Galliards have chronicled it, and yet still it holds mysteries.

Penumbral Domains

While the Penumbra of Earth offers an astonishing spiritual landscape, that landscape still bears some recognizable resemblance to the material world. Domains are where that similarity begins to break down. Domains can appear unpredictably in the Penumbra, where some aspect of Earth intersects with a deeper Umbral reality. Domains are the dens of strange spirits, buildings whose insides are bigger than their outsides, ancient places of power, and suggestions of futures yet to come.

Theurges have catalogued many types of Domains:

• Blights: Cityscapes devoid of any Gaian influence, Blights are depressingly common in these last days. Weaver-spirits spin webs while Wyrm-spirits breed pockets of corruption within, each trying to outdo the other.
• Chimares: Dreams and nightmares shape the Penumbra in a Chimare. These domains draw in (or are created by) the human and animal subconscious, who can even visit these places in their sleep. Chimares can realize joyful daydreams -- or manifest the darkest of terrors.
• Epiphs: Abstract concepts can stake out territory in the Penumbra, creating Domains devoted to ideas like "blue", "autumn," "twelve," and "flavor." These Epiphs are confusing and mind-bending places, though some Garou swear by the benefits of meditating there.
• Glens: Often hidden away in untouched wilderness, a Glen is a place that Gaian (and often some Wyld) energies still hold sway. Sentient trees and talking animals of unusual size guard these places jealousy from corrupting spiritual influences.
• Hellholes: The most polluted places on Earth rot the Penumbra, creating Hellholes, where the Wyrm thrives. Banes live and breed in such places, making the problem worse by manifesting their influence in the material world.
• Trods: Ancient places of Faerie power, most Trods lay desolate now. Some few still retain a hint of their former glory, and fewer still serve as gathering-places for what fae yet survive in the world.
• Webs: The Weaver maintains full control over these Domains, which can be found in places choked by human technological sprawl, and places where there is a relentless pressure to conform. Pattern-Spider and Net-Spider spirits lie in wait here, ready to entangle and assimilate the unwary.
• Wyldings: Rarely found these days, Wyldling Domains are places of unchecked Wyld power. Here, everything is constantly growing, changing, and becoming -- making them extraordinarily dangerous to anyone who wants to preserve their own natures.

The Near Umbra and the Near Realms

The spirit world is wider still than Earth's penumbral reflection. Moon Bridges or other paths can lead the Garou far from Earth, into the strange haze of the Near Umbra. In the Near Umbra, pure spirit reigns, with little correspondence to anything material. It is an ever-shifting infinity of imagination, where strange spirits roam and mighty Totems make their homes. Its logic is at various times orderly, chaotic, or corrupt, and it takes a wise Garou to navigate the Near Umbra without losing themselves in all its vast possibility.

But the Near Umbra isn't entirely unpredictable. Fourteen Near Realms (often called the "Umbral Realms") exist here, pockets of spiritual power that have been more-or-less stable for generations. Garou have long visited (or at least spoken of) these realms, using these journeys to seek spiritual insight into the very tangible problems on Earth. Around and between these Realms lie lesser Sub-Realms like the Tribal Homelands, and distinctive Zones of raw spirit like the Dream Zone. Garou Cosmologists often picture the Realms like moons orbiting the Penumbra of Earth, Sub-Realms swinging between them like comets, all interwoven by Zones like nebulae -- but of course the reality is much stranger than such a metaphor.

The path to each Realm (and sub-realm, and zone) is different: you might walk a Moon Bridge into the sky, climb into certain holes in the ground, follow a spirit path (called an airt) or perform a ritual -- but once inside, it usually feels as true and solid as matter. Each Realm has its own physics and its own spiritual laws that resemble those of Earth to varying degrees.

The fourteen Near Realms are these:

• The Abyss. A chasm of cosmic size, a pit with no known bottom, the Abyss is an ever-widening rift that threatens to swallow all of Gaia. All acts of extreme destruction fracture the Umbra, and the Abyss is the largest break. Deranged cults of monsters worship on its brink, hurling a steady stream of sacrifices into the depths. Brave or foolhardy Garou can find paths to lead them down the chasm walls, in search of things long-lost and forgotten. But a fall means oblivion -- nothing escapes the darkness of the deep, for some say the mouth of the Wyrm itself begins here.
• Aetherial Realm: Traveling "up" in the Near Umbra eventually brings one to the spiritual heavens called the Aetherial Realm. Here, travelers visit other planets and even other stars, homes to powerful alien spirits called the Planetary Incarnae. Luna, the Celestine of the moon, shows her face here, and all her Moon Bridges pass through the Realm. Anthelios -- the Red Star -- casts its baleful red glow through the Realm.
• Arcadia Gateway: Once upon a time, this Realm was the spiritual home to faerie magic. The gates to Fae itself could be found here, and a lush magical kingdom flourished, ruled by Sidhe kings and queens of untold grace. But those gates have long been closed, and now most of the Realm lays beneath a spell of winter, ruled by a queen of ice. The fae that remain are dominated by their dark and twisted sides, seeking to lure travelers off into the forests and bind them into unbreakable pacts.
• Atrocity Realm: Atrocity is the Realm of pain. Every act of torment throughout the Tellurian feeds this Realm. Every war, rape, murder, abuse, slaughter and genocide has its reflection captured here and set on infinite replay. Banes breed here in needle-lined pits; Scrags practice their tortures on the hapless victims of prior injustices. Many Garou are quick to point out how human atrocities tend to dominate this Realm, while overlooking that their own crimes are preserved here forever.
• Battleground: Similar to Atrocity but held in much higher regard by the Garou, the Battleground is a Realm devoted to warfare. Every armed conflict from prehistory through modern times is held in echo here, eternally reenacted by spirit warriors. Paths marked by signposts help visitors navigate the Realm to find the battles they're looking for. Joining these skirmishes allow Garou visitors to test their own skills, or to see what might have happened if the tides of historical battles had turned a different way. In the center of this Realm is the vast empty plain of Vigrithr, where the Get of Fenris believe the final battle of the Apocalypse will take place.
• CyberRealm: The advance of human technology reaches its logical extreme in this stronghold of the Weaver. Above, visitors discover a sleek futuristic city of steel and glass; controlled and ordered by malevolent machines, the city is hostile to all who would disturb its perfect technotopia. Below, subterranean warrens of concrete and infrastructure provide havens for the free-willed inhabitants of the Realm to fight against their robotic overlords. Glass Walkers in particular enjoy braving the dangers of this Realm, in search of futuristic weapons to use against enemies of the Garou.
• Erebus: This Realm is a Hell set aside to punish the the Garou for their failures and sins. Rivers of molten silver flow into a lake at the heart of this subterranean world; its vast caverns echo with the howls of Garou being purified in those searing "waters." Vicious guardian spirits prevent the sufferers from escaping. Some, it is rumored, might emerge from the silver lake cleansed, having paid their spiritual debts -- but going by the volume of tormented cries, most Garou subjected to punishment here are doomed to pay an eternal price.
• Flux: The strongest known concentration of Wyld energy in the Umbra, Flux is a Realm of constant growth, transformation and mutation. It is difficult even to describe, having no constant laws of physics, let alone paths or landmarks. Visitors should expect the unexpected here: dreams and reality intertwine, thought and memory and identity take on malleable substance, time and space distort, collapse and run backward --  nobody emerges from the Flux unchanged.
• Legendary Realm: A Galliard's paradise, the Legendary Realm is where the greatest stories of the Garou become larger than life. Noble Silver Fang kings lead armies of Garou against the most villainous of Black Spiral traitors. Heroic Fianna war-packs hunt Fomorian fae; Red Talon packs protect mythical species from human predation. Sub-realms called Tribal Homelands are adjunct to this Realm, collecting the wisdom of individual tribes. But perhaps the greatest wisdom for visitors comes from seeking the lost stories here: tales of tribes like the Croatan and the Bunyip, and all the Changing Breeds lost in the Wars of Rage.
• Malfeas: The heart of the Wyrm's power in the Near Umbra, Malfeas is a wound in Gaia, seething with spiritual disease. A twisted pit of filth, madness and corruption awaits visitors here, thick with every kind of Bane. In the deep reaches of Malfeas, vast and powerful Wyrm-beasts breed, horrors unimagined anywhere else on Earth or in the Umbra -- every one waiting for the day of the Apocalypse to break free and feast upon the world. The Black Spiral itself is here -- that path of torture that claimed an entire Tribe of Garou, and which continues to claim many (if not most) Garou visitors to the Realm.
• Pangaea: Before the tribes of the Garou, before the cities of man, before the Wyrm was ascendant, the world was a pure and primal wilderness. Pangaea remembers, an amalgamation of every forgotten age. Dinosaurs still roam this land, as well as all species now extinct. Tribes of early humans eke out a living in the verdant but harsh jungles and plains. Enormous plants and insects defend their niche in a prehistoric ecosystem. An Incarna dragon called the Elder Serpent guards this realm, which suffers constant attacks from Wyrm-forces eager to see all memories of Gaia in balance destroyed.
• Scar: Mankind birthed this realm out of all the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. The Scar is a vast city of factories and slums, belching smoke into the skies and poisons into the water. Bane foremen here drive slave-laborers to manufacture fetishes and talens for the Wyrm's agents on Earth. Visitors to the realm are likely to be captured and enslaved themselves.
• Summer Country: This Realm appears in lore of the Umbra, but few Theurges can say if it still exists. It was known as a Gaian paradise: a realm of harmony and peace, a crescent island of lush fertility rising from an ocean of crystal blue. It was a place where all wounds were healed, all burdens lifted, all chains broken. No Garou who has gone seeking this place has even found it, but Umbral explorers live in hope that Gaia may yet choose some Garou to visit. If the way here were known, the Wyrm would certainly enter as well -- and destroy the Realm once and for all.
• Wolfhome: Wolfhome seems to be an Earthlike realm at first, a world where packs of wolves still roam the plains, hunting their food, breeding in season -- as Gaia intended. The Realm forces Garou visitors into their Lupus forms and denies them many their Gifts and Fetishes, bringing them closer to their wolf nature. But it's not long before the Realm shows its true face to visitors. The wolves of Wolfhome are under relentless attack: humans encroach on their territories, drive off their game, set traps for them near their livestock, and hunt them for sport. Visitors either die as a hunted animal, or escape with a profound understanding of what wolves on Earth must endure.

Sub-Realms, Zones, and the Membrane

Lesser in scope and power than the Near Realms, sub-realms and zones fulfill purposes that are no less important or mysterious to the Garou.

Many Tribal Totem Incarnae maintain sub-realms near the Legendary Realm known as their Tribal Homelands. These worlds typify a tribe's interests and culture, serving as a refuge for spirits of the Totem's Brood. The spirits of tribal Ancestors live on here, ready to share stories and wisdom if shown the proper respect.

The line between spirit and dream is not always clear -- and nowhere is that more true than the swath of the Near Umbra called the Dream Zone. Sleep in the Umbra sometimes brings travelers here, where manifestations of one's subconscious become real. While human dreamers are most often responsible for the Chimares of the Penumbra, the Dream Zone of the Penumbra houses the dreams of all humanity -- not to mention the dreams of vast beings beyond humanity, which make the realm especially difficult to comprehend. The Dream Zone winds aimlessly throughout the Near Umbra, appearing and disappearing with no discernable pattern.

As one travels further and approaches the Deep Umbra, Vistas begin to appear. While these places are presumably sub-realms of their own, one never reaches them, but only observes them from afar. They offer glimpses of deep wisdom into abstract ideas like peace, nobility, courage and sacrifice. Many Garou have chased these visions, losing themselves in the Umbra forever.

Once one can travel no further in the Near Umbra, the Membrane appears -- the border between a spirit world that can be comprehended by mortal minds, and the great beyond. Anchorheads are sub-realms fused into the border, places where Garou may find passage through. Some Garou mystics speculate the Gauntlet around Earth and the Membrane around the Near Umbra are similar constructs of the Weaver's power, the first two of seven layers of reality.

The Deep Umbra

If one travels through the Membrane into the Deep Umbra, existence itself begins to open like a lotus. Infinities hold infinities here: the Triat expresses itself with indescribable power, shattering mortal minds. Travel here is dangerous but possible to those Garou who know the correct rites, and whose sense of self is strong enough to hold themselves together. The only known haven of constancy in the Deep Umbra is Luna herself: she orbits majestically through the expanse, sheltering those Garou travelers who can reach her.

The Dark Umbra

Some few Garou know of another spirit world, a place having nothing to do with Gaia's chosen warriors. This is the Dark Umbra, the realm of the human dead. An ashen world drained of color, this Umbra holds no "spirits" as the Garou understand them, just restless ghosts and alien civilizations of the dead. These beings do not understand or welcome the Garou, and for the most part the Garou can do little good in this place.